In today's large national and multi-national corporations, which frequently have numerous diverse small and middle-sized business subsidiaries, data integration between a corporate headquarters ERP management system and the ERP systems at each subsidiary can be an almost impossible task. In fact, up to 40% of all small and middle-sized businesses are subsidiaries of large corporations. It is common for subsidiaries to have implemented different solutions that are not completely compatible with the solutions at the corporate headquarters. It is also common for the subsidiaries to have access to fewer information technology resources than what is available at the corporate headquarters. This may occur for many reasons including: not using centralized planning and control to design the individual systems at each of the locations to be compatible; disparities in computing capabilities between the locations; or a subsidiary being purchased with a different existing information system. In addition, ERP systems at subsidiaries are often by design smaller and less capable, since the subsidiary system does not have the same data processing requirements as at the corporate headquarters.
Because of this system diversity, it can be extremely difficult, time consuming and expensive even to connect to all of the different ERP systems at diverse corporation's locations. In fact, it can be even more difficult, time consuming and expensive to enable all of the locations to be able to coherently share and use the information from each other location. Therefore, it would be desirable to be able to connect, easily and efficiently, a corporate headquarters ERP management system to all subsidiary ERP systems to enable the sharing of the information in each of the separate ERP systems.